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New Boeing Plane Orders Wiped Out by Cancellations

Boeing (NYSE: BA) released its latest report on airplane orders received -- and canceled -- through mid-April on Thursday, showing no increase in net orders from the previous week.

To date this year, the aerospace giant has booked:

274 "gross" orders for various flavors of its 737 regional airliner

four orders for the 777 airliner

one 747 order

one 787 order.

Once again, Boeing's latest tally shows a total absence of recent orders for any of Boeing's larger aircraft. For weeks now, we haven't seen news of a single order for a 747-, 777-, or 787-model aircraft. Notably, the 20 new 777-9X airliners, six 777-300ERs, and 14 787-9 Dreamliners that Japan's ANA Holdings announced it was ordering nearly a month ago still have not showed up in Boeing's official order book.

What is reflected in the book is the fact that Boeing added five new orders for 737-model airplanes over the past week -- but then had these new orders canceled out by cancellations of five orders for 737s. Boeing did not identify the airlines ordering the new aircraft, or making the cancellations.

To date, Boeing has suffered 45 cancellations of plane orders (all single-aisle 737s). Subtracted from the company's 280 gross orders booked across all aircraft models, this leaves net new orders at 235 -- the same as last week.

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Rich Smith presents a weekly summary of Boeing and Airbus orders and cancellations. That's data available on the two manufacturer websites. As pure facts . . . well, OK.

But then he tries to draw far-reaching conclusions about the data. "Notably", to take an example, a recently announced order has not made it to the official tally. He seems to not understand that an order may be announced before the contract is finalized with configuration details.

Order and cancellation data are too sparse to draw conclusions about on a weekly basis. That's like a sports commentator reporting marathon runner progress every five yards, as if the race hinges on that data.

Non-events are currently being reported too frequently. A monthly order report would make sense, supplemented when sizable events occur.

Boeing has a net order accounting on its order charts. They will count by canceling 5 NG's which are converted into MAX orders. The net effect is no growth for that order for 737's. The reader will see five cancellations and believe Boeing loses another customer, when in fact they have gained a conversion from the NG to the Max line of aircraft. The net effect is nil but it confuses readers because Boeing does not footnote what has happened. They need to do that since it gives those following, a false sense of what is happening with the order book without notes.

Sending report...

As a defense writer for The Motley Fool, I focus on defense and aerospace stocks. My job? Every day of the week, I'm monitoring the news, figuring out the winners and losers, and tracking down the promising companies for you to invest in. Follow me on Twitter or Facebook for the most important developments in defense & aerospace, and other great stories.
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